Abstract
Inside Crown Court provides a comprehensive account of the experiences of victims, witnesses and defendants who appear at the Crown Court in England and Wales. The authors draw upon interviews and court observations to describe the essential features of the court process as experienced by these groups of individuals (referred to as ‘court users’), the interplay between professionals and members of these groups and the extent to which the court process is regarded as legitimate and fair. This book offers a compelling and nuanced examination of a subject that is often unacknowledged or misunderstood by researchers and legal professionals alike.
The authors set the scene by offering a summary of the relevant literature, a detailed account of their methodology and an overview of the role of the Crown Court within the court system in England and Wales. They then present five chapters of empirical findings based on 147 interviews with court users and criminal justice professionals and 200 hours of Crown Court observations. In Chapter 3, the extent to which the court process establishes the ‘truth’ in relation to alleged offences is called into question through an examination of the subjective experience of the parties involved and the push for guilty pleas. Chapter 4 argues that while the adversarial nature of the court process creates the impression of a division between the prosecution and defence, in reality it is the divide between professionals and court users that is most prominent. Chapter 5 describes what is termed ‘structured mayhem’. It is argued that despite the delays and the start and stop nature of the process incurred by failures to attend, technological problems and missing paperwork, the court process maintains an underlying structured and ordered character. In Chapter 6, the authors assert that notwithstanding the emotional strain associated with coming to court, the vast majority of court users continue to attend and perform the roles expected of them. Finally, Chapter 7 suggests that court users conform to the rules because they believe in the legitimacy of the process. This perception of legitimacy is based on an interaction between users’ moral alignment with the criminal justice system, the outcome of the case, the extent to which decision making is regarded as fair, respectful treatment by professionals and defendants’ passive acceptance of the process. The book concludes by offering suggestions aimed at improving the experiences of victims, witnesses and defendants based on the findings of the study.
This work offers an important contribution to a body of knowledge that is currently extremely limited in scope. Indeed, the challenges associated with conducting research in the criminal courts are well known to criminological researchers. Baldwin (2008) argues that the range of topics researchers have been able to examine has been restricted by issues such as ‘no-go areas’ (e.g. an inability to observe how sentencing decisions are reached, and a legal prohibition from speaking to jury members) and court practitioners’ resistance – and even hostility – to social research. Although the courts have become more accessible to researchers recently, the character of this research is often determined by the interests of the funding bodies involved. Consequently, much of the literature related to the criminal court is descriptive in nature (Baldwin, 2008). Although Inside Crown Court maintains this descriptive character to some extent, it also offers a critical perspective of the court process in England and Wales that is largely absent from the existing literature and offers many insights that lay the foundation for theoretical advancements in the field. For instance, the authors challenge commonly held beliefs about the roles of the various individuals involved in the court process. Although the adversarial system is, by its very nature, designed to pit the prosecution against the defence, this research demonstrates that the real divide in the court process exists between court professionals and court users. The professional roles of practitioners combined with their often cold, formulaic treatment of court users create feelings of marginalization and exclusion that result in an ‘insider vs outsider’ situation. This finding moves knowledge beyond that generated by policy-oriented research and contributes to our understanding of the inequalities inherent in the court process.
Although this research makes an impressive contribution to its field, the findings are limited by their lack of generalizability. First, as the authors note, the Crown Court deals with the most serious cases which account for under 10 per cent of all criminal cases that come before the courts in England and Wales. The needs and experiences of these ‘court users’ may differ markedly from those of victims, witnesses and defendants who appear in other courts. For instance, it is conceivable that a witness might experience more anxiety if he or she was testifying in a murder case in a Crown Court compared to a minor theft case in a magistrates’ court. It is also plausible that a witness involved in a more serious crime would be offered more support by criminal justice professionals (e.g. the ability to testify by live video link or behind a screen). Second, even when the parameters are restricted to Crown Court users, there is the additional issue of ‘court culture’. A court’s culture is determined by the informal practices, norms and expectations shared by court practitioners within a court system (Church, 1982). Research has consistently demonstrated that court procedure and functioning is highly dependent on the culture of each individual court and that this culture can be extremely variable even between courts in similar jurisdictions. Since the book focuses on only two courts in England and Wales, it is conceivable that the results are not only limited to Crown Court users, but also to the two locations of the study, specifically. Third, although the researchers interviewed a diverse range of court users, they did not differentiate their findings by race, gender, class or any other demographic feature. As such, it is unclear whether experience varies according to these factors. This is not to say that the results are inapplicable to a wide range of individuals It is possible, if not probable, that many of these experiences are widespread. However, additional research must be conducted before we can assume that the results of this study accurately represent the views of most victims, witnesses and defendants.
The difficulties related to the book’s generalizability do not minimize its ground-breaking contribution to court research in England and Wales. Rather, this work paves the way for additional research in a wider range of courts and suggests a closer examination of the experiences of different types of court users. This ambitious book will be of interest to researchers, legal practitioners and policy-makers who are interested in developing a better understanding of the impact of the process on court users and who may be seeking solutions to improve their experiences.